14

 

Every year, particularly at the end of winter and spring, I spend many hours on my knees. This is no display of supplication or begging for surrender, nor is it a dramatization of “he’ll come crawling back on all fours” and other such salutations and orations concerned with humiliation and inferiority. All these are derived from the lowliness of a man on bended knees, and the fact that walking on all fours belongs to beasts and animals, whereas the human—superior in his own eyes—stands erect and walks on two legs. But I willingly crawl on all fours for my own benefit, and I do so because I find this a comfortable way to tend the weeds that grow in my garden. I have a pair of old and worn-out trousers for this purpose, with soil embedded in the knees that never disappears when soaked or scrubbed or washed.

Weeding, isuv in Hebrew—veteran farmers pronounce the final letter as a hard b rather than the more usual soft v—is an extremely important craft. It begins in winter, when weeds sprout, and continues as they grow, and is carried out mostly toward spring and up until it ends, because this is the last opportunity to get rid of the weeds before they produce seeds that will sprout the following year.

And why do I carry out this extremely important job on all fours? “Because after all I’m an elderly lady,” as my grandmother used to tell everyone, and once again I have no choice. Young and agile gardeners do their weeding bent over. Elderly gardeners stoop down but rest one arm on a knee or sit on a stool or hire a gardener. I decided to get down on my knees, and this is why I am numbered among the family of weeders on all fours.

The weeds in my garden possess a strength and vitality that no other plants have, not only in comparison with domesticated plants, but also in comparison with the wild plants I grow. The calendula in my garden, for example, is hardy and spreads much farther than the cornflower, and the reason is simple: one I am interested in; the other I am not. If I were to switch preferences, the calendula would immediately weaken, and the cornflower would take over the garden and threaten to cover it completely.

Regarding these observations, Rabbi Hanina ben Pazzi preceded me when he said, “These thorns are neither weeded nor sown, yet of their own accord they grow and spring up, whereas how much pain and toil is required before wheat can be made to grow.” These words appear in Genesis Rabba as an allegory for the easy impregnation of Hagar and the daughters of Lot. They and their sons—Ishmael, Moab, and Ammon—were comparable in Rabbi Hanina ben Pazzi’s eyes to thorns that multiply and flourish although they are not sown, the area around them is not weeded, and they are not cared for, as compared with our four outstanding matriarchs, likened to wheat, who suffered and exerted themselves in order to conceive. I will add something else from the Bible to this: the Israelites in Egypt multiplied and grew the more they were afflicted and persecuted, exactly like the thorns and weeds in my garden, which sprout and grow and multiply sevenfold.

Rabbi Hanina ben Pazzi’s lesson suggests a particular arrogance over other nations that is recognized and known within other nations and cultures, too. But within this allegory the simple despair of a cultivator of the land, battling weeds unsuccessfully, is considerable. I should know: year after year, I crawl on all fours in the mud, weeding and tearing out and uprooting, utterly overthrowing the enemy exactly as I overthrew and eradicated it from the face of the earth last year, and I will continue annihilating the enemy once and for all in years to come. In doing this, I think not only about myself but about all our other annihilators and exterminators and liquidators, although they, as compared with myself, stand tall and will not prostrate themselves or bow down, whereas I acknowledge the real ratio of power and crawl on all fours.

Not that solutions are lacking. Things have changed since the days of Rabbi Hanina ben Pazzi, agriculture has progressed, and today farmers spray weeds with all kinds of poison and weed inhibitors. But these substances are powerful and dangerous, and my garden is no modern agricultural field. It is a nature reserve, not just because of the various plants that grow there but because of the methods I use. Furthermore, it is a fraction of the size of huge wheat or corn or vegetable fields, and spraying it might damage the plants I grow and value, and, of course, spraying pollutes the ground.

For this reason, I have tried and am still trying various other methods: I till the enemy when it begins to sprout—but this is not sufficient. I cover sections of the garden with nylon sheeting—but it is not a pleasant sight to behold. I cut the weeds with a power scythe, and although it works very efficiently under certain conditions, it doesn’t pull out the enemy by its roots, and due to its incredible speed it also cuts plants I do not want to eliminate. Once I even considered hiring a gardener or a laborer, but I was sure that my buttercups and cyclamens would not take kindly to this. In short, there is no choice. A land invasion is required, a close-quarters battle on planted territory from terrace to terrace and from flower bed to flower bed. Face-to-face combat at point-blank range, to see the green of its eyes, to grasp it by the neck and root it out. This is the only way to win, annihilate, and eradicate, until the next extermination campaign the following winter.

The weeding is continuous, monotonous, slow, and boring. Through the years I have also acquired the ability to easily distinguish between “for us” and “for our adversaries” in the garden, and therefore the battle of the weeds no longer requires my attention or singular thought. And since the human brain does not like to be idle, passing deliberations creep into the heart: about man and land, about what the land gives and what it covers and conceals, about living on the land and the respite within it, about all the blood and the brothers crying from within me and within the land, all that has happened until now and all that will follow, and to what purpose and just because and otherwise and why.

This is why the actual act of crawling on all fours also helps, returning me to early evolutionary stages and debates. My body fills with arguments. I hear my knees begging to return to an upright position, and my spine vigorously objecting, declaring that as far as it is concerned, I can stay in this position forever, and it even tries to convince my skin that it can go back to sprouting fur. I feel my fingers, rummaging among the plants, grasping stems and encountering roots and bugs, fingers that in days gone by foraged for food. Indeed, I take this opportunity to gather wild spinach and chicory, from which a side dish can be made for a meal.

Crawling on all fours also affords an alternative perspective and agreeable sense of humility. It brings the nose and the eye and the ear closer to buds that usually remain unseen, and also the little creatures that live among them: various kinds of lizards and spiders and earthworms and insects and skinks that bustle around there, particularly in springtime, escaping the hand that pulls out the plants under which they hide, revealing to me that my world is one of a myriad of worlds existing side by side in this little universe—right here in my garden.

Wonder creeps into the heart: Whom, in fact, am I fighting here? Why and for what? Surely all the plants I grow, and also the plants I root out, are wild ones. If this is so, who decides that buttercups are preferable over clover? And what does squill have over ragwort? And blue cornflower over thistle? And hollyhock over mallow? Perhaps I’ve become afflicted with the inclination of certain environmental and nature conservation organizations to stand up for dolphins and pandas rather than toads and spiders?

There are gardeners of wild areas with principles and commandments. They do not meddle with the natural processes that exist in their gardens. They will not weed or sow or water or fertilize. But my garden and I are less ideological, and religiosity in any sphere is repugnant to me. I prefer cyclamens to briars, although both are wildflowers, and I intervene in the struggle for survival that prevails in the garden, weeding those I do not desire and giving an unfair advantage to those I cherish. During droughts and particularly severe heat waves I even water my flowers a little, pruning the shoots that the Judas tree and bay laurel produce around the trunk and shaping the carob, so that one day I will be able to sit in its shade with friends. For the exact same reasons, I also gather up and store and sow the seeds in better and safer conditions than those provided by nature.

Added to this is the human inclination, common also to those who are close to nature and who love it, to see weeding as a battle between good and evil, like a civilized person battling barbarians, or Gideon against the Midianites. Connected to this is an interesting phenomenon: all the wild plants I sow and plant and grow and love are ones that I know personally, each one by name and appearance, according to both its general shape and each of its parts at every stage of its life. But the enemies, the same endless moblike pack of wild plants that I declare war on, they are all one solid mass in my mind and have no names. They are “crabgrass” and “bad weeds” and that’s it. The eye recognizes them and the hand is skilled at pulling them out, but apart from an incensed, general “know thine enemy,” there is nothing between us at all.

As a matter of fact, I know one of them close-up, and actually it is one I find particularly annoying: it has a pale root that resembles parsley but slenderer and more delicate, and its stems, which bear serrated leaves, are close to the ground. The power scythe fails to cut it and fingers have trouble getting hold of the stem and pulling it out by the roots.

Toward the end of its life this plant changes from green to pale blue-gray, its stem stands tall, hardens, and produces small thorny fruits which stick to socks, trousers, or fur—depending what one has on one’s shins. I went to the trouble of finding out that the name of this bad pest is gzir, known in English as spreading hedge parsley or tall sock-destroyer, and botanists here even refer to it as “gazir pest,” as if wanting to give reason and validation for my feelings.

Over the years, the crabgrass and I have reached a certain balance of terror. But there are surprises within it, too, and the last word has yet to be spoken. When I arrived here, the house was surrounded by nettles and calendulas. I wanted to eradicate the nettles entirely, and the calendulas—a nice-looking plant but one that tends to occupy and settle—I wanted to whittle down. So after a few years of my systematic weeding and mowing, the garden was once again devoid of even a single nettle, and the calendulas retreated to the area I allocated to them.

I naïvely thought I had succeeded. Here and there, when friends or colleagues who also enjoy gardening told me that the battle of crabgrass is a lost one, I offered the nettles and calendulas as proof that it is possible to triumph over them. But a few more years passed, and one winter—I remember the astonishment that gripped me—I suddenly discovered a carpet of nettles in a part of the garden that had never suffered from them, and the calendulas returned, swiftly spreading over extensive areas.

If I were paranoid, this would have convinced me that some adversary or enemy had secretly sown them for reasons known to him alone. But the truth is that nature has her own ways of teaching us humility. This is why I buckled up my dirty old work trousers, got down on my knees, and returned to battle. A wild garden needs to preserve boundaries and laws, and love for that garden requires investment and effort. This is exactly what should be done in other spheres and interests of life, if you want flowers to bloom there.